Entergy Corp. has filed a new lawsuit against the federal government to recoup storage waste costs that it has incurred despite, in this case, paying fees on behalf of the Pilgrim NPP for construction of a nuclear waste repository that has never been built.
The company purchased Pilgrim in 1999 from Boston Edison. Since then, it has been paying the government its contribution towards a nuclear waste repository, construction of which was mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit is the second one filed on behalf of the power station. The first one covered the cost of fees and waste storage from 1999 through 2008. In that case, Entergy won $4.1 million to cover storage expenses and $27,000 to cover its legal expenses. The new lawsuit covers Dec. 31, 2008 through Sept. 30, 2014.
The Court of Federal Claims awarded Boston Edison $40 million in damages in 2008 in a decision that was later reversed. The Federal Circuit retracted the $40 million award in 2011, stipulating that the damages the company sought could not be calculated until Pilgrim NPP was shut down for decommissioning.
The new lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, is also part of an on-going strategy of recouping waste storage expenses in court.
In a similar pattern, Entergy, which owns 11 reactors at nine separate facilities, was awarded $88 million in 2012 to cover waste storage at the Vermont Yankee Power Station, which was shut down for decommissioning in December for economic reasons. Entergy has also filed a follow-up suit on behalf of Vermont Yankee to cover the costs of 45 dry storage casks.
Pilgrim currently has 3,300 spent fuel assemblies in a storage pool built to hold 800. New racks were built to allow the pool to to hold more than four times the number or assemblies it was originally built to hold. But now, the pool is chock full.
Attorney L. Jager Smith Jr. told the Cape Cod Times that the first lawsuit involved costs of spent fuel pool racks and regulatory fees. Since then, he said, Entergy has built a dry field storage area for spent fuel.